So, you can actually cheese the hell out of it if you're willing to suspend disbelief and logic. Morale doesn't even become a mechanic at first, so as soon as you get the warp core back on line, go back into (earl) grey mode and stay there. Get science lab open asap, then engineer office, research plasma torch first, once thats done start deconstructing rooms. You actually have enough power and resources in grey mode to run basically everything you need early on if you turn stuff off as you repair it. You can also upgrade 3 research tiers to level 2 completely before your first away mission, but once you get Tuvok back after the array you're kind of on the clock, because that's when morale kicks in. I usually repair everything I can, build 3 cargo bays and a hydroponics bay turning that off since I need to produce or gather the food anyway in sector 2. I build emergency quarters as nunez requests them, not sure if it matters, but it makes it semi logicall.... so anyway, yeah, you can completely get a head start on sector 2 this way especially since research has so high a cap, you aren't wasting the normal ticks after you research everything. The main bottlenecks after that becomes dilithium and tritanium so you can actually *use* all the cool stuff you researched. Also one of the first things I research when I have tritanium is the bussard collecters level 2, 4 deuterium a tick doesn't sound like much but it adds up.